For those of you that do not know, I am a non-smoker. I enjoy the occasional cigar every now and then, but I smoke them very infrequently (maybe once or twice a month) and usually in the privacy of my own home. I will also admit that I hate coming home from a bar smelling like cigarette smoke. I remember when I used to travel every week and eat in restaurants every night, my entire suitcase would reek of smoke. In spite of my personal feelings, I will still never support a government mandated smoking ban. If a restaurant wants to set a policy allowing or disallowing smoking, that is their business. Since there are plenty of choices out there, if other people's smoking bothered me too much, I would simply vote with my wallet. Besides, it isn't my place to use the police power of government to force business owners to comply with my ideology. But that doesn't stop some folks.

As the Washington Post points out, there are still heated political battles going on out there, and tyranny is winning.

Selby Scaggs, the owner of the Anchor Inn Seafood Restaurant in Wheaton, is convinced that there is nothing healthier for his business than cigarette smoke.

Before October, his patrons would park on stools at the bar and pop money into a computer trivia game while ordering drinks and chain-smoking. But after Montgomery County's indoor smoking ban took effect Oct. 9, Scaggs's alcohol sales dropped 40 percent, and the game business fell by more than half.

"I still have some regulars who come in, but they don't stay long, and they don't spend as much money," said Scaggs, who is lobbying to have the county ordinance rescinded.

Anti-smokers aren't happy with having a mixture of smoking and non-smoking restaurants. They want every place, even those they will never patronize, to abide by their temperance rules. In fact, since smokers can just move to places unaffected by the ban, temperance will not work without widespread implementation.

According to tax receipts and dozens of studies, indoor workplace smoking bans have had no effect on the overall fiscal health of the bar and restaurant industry, especially when implemented uniformly on a statewide level.

When smoking bans are implemented on a small scale, customers will cross county or city lines to seek out smoking havens and places not affected by the ban. Prohibitionists realize this, and will always seek to expand their ban. With enough never being enough, it won't be long before smoking bans are expanded to include the privacy of your own home or automobile. (Homes and cars with children will be especially easy targets.)

Even though there is plenty of proof out there that smoking bans will financially hurt some small business owners and their employees, the smoke nazis are constantly pushing the hard sell with confusing studies and financial figures. Studies often contradict each other.

Although some studies indicate that restaurants and bars are hurt financially by smoking bans, those surveys were funded largely by the tobacco industry or its associates and often used flawed data, according to an analysis by Andrew Hyland, a research scientist at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, who examined 97 studies from 30 states and eight countries.

Hyland works for a cancer institute, and he has the nerve to accuse the tobacco industry of being impartial. As if his own agenda doesn't skew his "analysis". Of course some reports just don't tell the whole story. Consider this statement about the New York State smoking ban:

Five months later, the New York State Department of Labor reported that the bar and restaurant industry had grown by about 10,000 jobs.

The job growth is good news, but it is taken out of context. We are in an economic recovery, and without taking that into account, it is difficult to say what impact the smoking ban has had on New York's economy. How much would the industry have grown without the ban? Have they taken the impact of terrorism on New York tourism into account? This could also be part of a normal post-9/11 recovery.

Of course, nothing sums up the attitude of the neo-temperance movement like this:

"Once these policies become the social norm, people tend to adapt and support them," said Lois Biener, director of the Center for Survey Research at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

Just because resistance may be futile, and acceptance may be inevitable, doesn't mean that their policies are any less tyrannical. They can spew all the statistics they want, but they don't ring true when coupled with the fact that Dietle's Tavern in Silver Spring and Tropics Restaurant in Germantown have both gone under as a direct result of the Montgomery County (Maryland) smoking ban.

No government should be in the business of behavior control. Those that support the nanny movement need to accept the fact that people have vices. Using the threat of lethal force in an attempt to change a person's habits or behavior to something you find more acceptable is tyranny no matter how you slice it. Good financial statistics and stories about silver linings don't change that fact.